


Red Skies (Take Warning)

by kitkatt0430



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bittersweet Ending, Earth-2 isn't going down without a fight, Earth-2 still doesn't survive though, Gen, Jesse and Harry survive the anti-matter wave, Jesse time travels for the first time in typical Flash Tradition, M/M, Mostly Gen, Red Skies Crisis lead up, Temporary Character Death, Time Travel Fix-It, background harrisco, that is to say that she time travels by accident in the middle of a crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:27:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28102407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitkatt0430/pseuds/kitkatt0430
Summary: Barry tried to explain how time travel worked to her once.  Jesse was fairly certain he made sense to himself, but to her it still sounded like running really fast and wishing really hard.And then Jesse's father dies, caught in an antimatter wave.  His last words... run, Jesse, run.
Relationships: Cisco Ramon/Earth-2 Harrison "Harry" Wells, Earth-2 Harrison "Harry" Wells & Jesse "Quick" Wells
Comments: 2
Kudos: 30





	Red Skies (Take Warning)

**Author's Note:**

> So originally I wanted Jesse to time travel multiple times, but realized I could either have Jesse in a time traveling save her dad loop or I could fix the red skies crisis... so I guess I may have another Jesse centric story coming up soon?

Jesse learns a lot of important lessons from Barry Allen. How to stop without crashing and hurting herself. How to phase through solid objects. How to run up and down walls while keeping her momentum steady...

He attempted to teach her the basics of time travel too. Not that he wanted her to actually try it, but so that if it was ever necessary she could do it herself. With any luck, it'd never be necessary.

Now, Jesse is a genius. She is the daughter of two genii. Intelligence runs in her veins and keeps her up on science binges at night. But absolutely nothing Barry tells her about how to time travel as a speedster makes any sense whatsoever. It's all nonsense. She's half convinced he's pulling her leg.

Because all those fancy equations for running into the Speed Force at x speed to reach y time aren't actually used in any realistic sense. They're more of a visualization guide. Because ultimately time travel for speedsters boils down to running really fast and wishing really hard. And Jesse's brain just can't compute any of that. She just... doesn't like it when the math is useless.

"It's not useless," Barry had insisted. "In this case, our brains are the computer and focusing on the math is how we input the variables to achieve the result we want."

But it's still just not... clicking in Jesse's head. There's a disconnect there that she can't seem to bridge the gap for.

"There's an emotional component too," Barry admitted, which just makes his explanation worse. "The more desperate you feel about fixing something, the easier it is to time travel."

She eventually just tells Barry to stop trying. She's not going to get it. And she doesn't need to get it, since Earth-2's meta menaces are a lot quieter than Earth-1's. What's the likelihood she's going to need to time travel to save the world?

In retrospect, Jesse probably shouldn't have said those exact words quite so flippantly.

* * *

She sees an echo of herself run past the week before it happens. But she's in the middle of fighting the Trickster, so she doesn't have time to think about it and later just attributes it to James Jesse trying some new trick out that didn't work as expected.

Jesse doesn't even think to mention it to her father at dinner that night. He's still busy trying to undo the damage he did to himself on Earth-1 and she doesn't want to burden him with worries about something inconsequential

* * *

The universe is not destroyed all at once. In fact, Jesse has no idea when it started. Which means she can't go back to before it started and stop it. Even if she did know how.

The skies go red as the antimatter wave sweeps through the sky. 

"Go to Earth-1 now, Jesse," her father tells her. "Warn them what's coming."

"I'm not leaving you, dad," she insists, her voice cracking. 

"We don't have time to argue," he snaps, grabbing her by the arms and shoving her away. "Run, Jesse, run!"

She does. She runs into the Speed Force, wishing she could find a way to stop this. She can't lose her father. She can't.

Running really fast and wishing really hard. It really is the magic that makes time travel work.

Of course, then the Trickster is blowing Jesse across the street and everything goes dark.

* * *

"Jesse!"

She's engulfed by her father's arms almost the moment she sits up and she clings to him, fingers twisted in the sleeves of his shirt. For a moment, she doesn't know where she is or when she is... just that her dad is here and alive.

Jesse starts crying, sobbing into her dad's chest.

"Jesse, sweetheart," he murmurs, so much freer with the terms of endearments these days. "What's wrong? This... this isn't about the Trickster getting away, is it?"

She shook her head. "I time traveled. A week, I think. Daddy," she says, wishing with all her might that she was seven years old and thought her father could do anything again. "Daddy, we're all gonna die. And I don't know how to stop it."

* * *

They go to Earth-1 pretty much immediately. Because for the last several years, when in doubt Harry Wells always turns to Cisco for help.

It's almost sweet how happy those two are to see each other again. 

"Red Skies," Barry echoes uncertainly and then leads them to the Time Vault, which looks just like her father's panic room. "When I first became the Flash, this article had nothing to do with the Red Skies Crisis. It was about the Flash disappearing after a fight with the Reverse Flash - presumably the very fight where he ran back in time to murder my mother. We're not quite sure when the event in the article became about me disappearing in the Red Skies Crisis. We just... checked one day and it was this. And because we only have the headline, image, and a small portion of the actual article, we didn't have any reason to believe this would affect other Earths too. And until last May, the article was dated for 2024." It is now, very clearly, dated 2019.

"Could this have been caused by the same timeline change that erased... that erased your daughter?" Harry asked hesitantly.

Barry nodded, shakily, and Jesse feels awful. She didn't even know Barry and Iris had a daughter. "Whatever change she made that erased herself from existence does seem to be the same thing that sped up this," Barry admitted. "We need to evacuate your Earth to ours. As many people as possible. You said we have a week?"

"Less," Jesse said. "When the red skies come, we'll only have an hour before the wave destroys our Earth." She doesn't let herself think of all the other planets in her universe. All the lives about to be snuffed out of existence that she can't save. 

She tells herself to concentrate on the lives she can save. Like her dad, who will be going back to Earth-2 over her dead body.

* * *

Her father goes back, of course, intent on leading the evacuation efforts.

She's not sure when he became so selfless. It scares her - selflessness and hubris were the combination that sapped his intelligence and nearly turned his brain to mush.

He can't die again. Not again.

* * *

Experimental Dwarf Star technology shrinks entire cities, once they convince the people of Atlantis of what's coming. It's difficult, though taking the Prince to see Earth-1 helps convince them that what Jesse's telling them is the truth. She also shares her memories of the event.

Her father watches from Jesse's point of view as Central City dies all around her. She buries her face against his chest. She can't watch it happen all over again.

Dwarf Star Alloy not only shrinks the cities but also reduces their mass somehow. The resulting mini-metroplexes should be stocked with enough food to last the city a year. They shrink some farmlands too, in hopes that they'll continue to be able to grow food within the artificial ecosystems developed to hold the shrunken lands and people.

They look like small square blocks to Jesse. Stacked all together and fitted into a briefcase. She and a handful of of others bring dozens of these through the breaches, not just to Earth-1 but to a few others too. Hedging their bets in case the crisis comes to other universes too. Most of this was done without government approval, or warning. There's no telling what the people shrunk down inside the cubes think of it.

"It's like the Black Elfstone from the _Shannara_ series," Cisco said, staring in awe at the technology. "The Elves would use it to hide and move their main city throughout the generations. Naturally, whenever they need it, the stone has gone lost so there has to be an epic quest to rediscover it..."

Central City - her Central City - is somewhere in one of those cubes. She tells herself she'll see it again. Maybe they'll colonize the moon. Or Mars. Call it New Earth-2.

* * *

Jesse ends up joining the other heroes, fighting against time to evacuate Earth-38. Much like her own Earth, too many lives are left behind before the end comes. The survivors come to Earth-1 just like her and her father. There are fewer survivors of that Earth than her own. They had no Dwarf Star 'Elfstones' to offer them, so those people have to leave their cities and resources behind.

But evacuating doesn't do the people of either Earth any good.

She watches the end come all over again, unable hide her eyes as the universe dissolves around her. The last thing she's aware of is the feeling of her father's arms around her shoulders and the knowledge that she's always been so very, very loved.

* * *

She wakes up afterwards. That's a surprise. At first, Jesse's not sure why it'd be surprising, just that it was.

Jesse Wells remembers two distinct time lines. In one, she came from a world designated Earth-2. In the other, she's never known any other Earth but this one. In both, her father is Harrison Wells. And in both her mother died when Jesse was very young.

Her memories are a mess and it's the old timeline she remembers the strongest. Most notably, the way her father held her as the end came. She jumps out of bed, speeding into her day clothes - still a speedster, that's good... isn't it? - and then hurries out to the kitchen to throw herself into his arms.

"My Jesse Quick," he murmurs, holding her tightly. His own memories as jumbled as hers.

* * *

The cubes are gone. All that hard work... for nothing. Their Earth - this Earth - is now a mix up of Earth-1 and Earth-2 and Earth-38 and possibly one other. Atlantis and Gorilla City are here now, but so many lives were lost, subsumed by their doppelgangers.

In this life, her father owns STAR Labs, which he'd built in partnership with his wife - Tess Morgan - and a financial backer who'd been revealed to be the time traveling Eobard Thawne. Now the owners were her father, Jesse, and Barry. Jesse's been attending college out of state, only back in town for the winter break. She's been quietly doing super heroics at her college town, supported by her sorority sisters. 

Jesse doesn't want to slip easily into this new timeline. She doesn't want to just forget the billions of people who are gone now. Not just dead, but never existed. But if she doesn't, then she won't really have any kind of life left for herself.

She wonders sometimes, whether learning to time travel the hard way was a blessing or a curse. Maybe she'd still exist in this timeline, blissfully unaware of what she'd lost if she hadn't.

But today is Christmas and Jesse wants to focus on something else. Something happy.

Like her father thinking he's being subtle, getting 'trapped' beneath the mistletoe with Cisco. There's nothing subtle in the least about what's been brewing between those two for years. In either timeline. And even after setting himself and Cisco up, Harry Wells is unable to take that final step.

So Jesse cheers and laughs when Cisco huffs in amusement and drags her father down into a kiss.

Her father is whole here, in this timeline. Undamaged by the self-destructive impulses that had once created the Thinking Cap. And he's happy and he's in love... and he's not dead, screaming her name.

Yeah... Jesse can learn to live in this timeline. Somehow, she'll be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> The Shannara book series is wonderful and amazing and I fully recommend it if you're looking for a good fantasy series to binge read. Do not ever watch the Shannara Chronicles tv show. For the love of all that makes a good plot and decent characters... do not watch that show. It's an insult to everything and everyone who has ever enjoyed The Elfstones of Shannara. *cries* It hurt to watch and I do not want others to share my suffering.


End file.
